Simplify Life …

In Dec 2016, the American elections concluded and Donald Trump was elected to the Oval office. And with this started the rise of far right politics across the world. Even before December, the right wingers loomed over the horizon but with the winning of Trump they were on steroids of sorts. Whether its Theresa May in UK or Marine Le Pen in France, people all over the world seem to gravitate towards far tight thoughts. Anybody who eulogizes anti-immigration or a cut off from some geo-political cum economic group (read as EU) or a blanket ban on certain religions seem to ascend to the highest political seat.

These overt expressions of extremism have given birth to discrimination and ridicule in public at large. The recent incident of an Irish woman ranting hate talks on a train is a live manifestation of such ideas. Many people in western nations don’t understand the basic difference between religions. For many Sikhism and Islam is same. The color of one’s skin or appearance of oneself is easily misconstrued for characteristics of a terrorist organization. Few Indians in US were a victim of several such hate crimes. The recent travel bans for people from certain nations only shows a narrow-sighted binary approach to solve complex problems. Here is the response to some sample problems –

Problem No jobs for locals Response Ban immigration

Problem Terror strikes in the country Response Ban people from entering

Its like going back to decades old tradition of protectionism and covertness. Our forefathers toiled hard against very same behaviors. Its like modern day untouchability where we don’t want people from certain geographies any where near us.

If all the nations of the world borrow (& implement) the thought of building border walls, soon world will be like big prison cells where you can interact with inmates of your cell only. Meaning of global currency- USD or a global language – English will also lose their relevance then.

Today I attempted a long pending dream of making a solar cooker from household items.

Items needed are

a shoe box

black color paint

scissor

glue

cutter

aluminium foil (you can use the one from kitchen)

a transparent plastic

some cardboard pieces

Process

1) Paint the bottom (inner side) of the shoe box with the black color. This will help in retaining the sun rays in the box

2) Cut 4 cardboard pieces such that they can fit inside the box and act as 4 walls. Now cover these with aluminium foil

3) Take a cardboard piece & draw out a rectangular window leaving approximately 2.5 cms width from all the edges of the cardboard. Now cut this rectangular piece & cover the remaining piece with the transparent plastic. This will act as a lid.

4) Cover the top (inner side) of the box with aluminium foil. This will help in directing the sun rays in the box.

Done. Your solar cooker is ready. This will take approximately 50 mins to make.

I tried out maggi & it turned our pretty well. Though it did not cook in 2 mins, I was happy to see it cook in about 15 mins

Yeoman is a scaffolding tool that helps you to kickstart new projects using best practices. It creates the project hierarchy & the basic files required for many projects using technology specific generators.

e.g. Yeoman provides a generator for angular project called as generator-angular

Pre-requisites

Node has to be installed to progress.

Steps to get started with Yeoman

1) Steps to setup dev env

Install yo & its dependencies using the below command

npm install –global yo bower grunt-cli

If you see issues related to permission please execute the command with sudo privileges.

2) Check if everything is installed properly. If everything is fine, the versions of yo, bower & grunt should be displayed

yo –-version && bower –-version && grunt –-version

3) Install a Yeoman Generator for Angular. Note that there are many generators which you can use yeoman for

sudo npm install -g generator-angular

4) Make a new directory (say demoYeoman)

5) Goto the newly created directory (demoYeoman in our case)

6) Hit the ‘yo’ command by selecting ‘Run the Angular Generator’. At this step yo will ask for configuring your project. Select the defaults.Yeoman will automatically scaffold your app along with the necessary dependencies

7) Check the project structure generated

8) Start the server. In mac, python is installed by default which provides a simple http server. Start that server using the below command

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9999

9) Check your application. Run the below command

grunt test

If any point you get errors related to karma, hit the following 2 commands-